On the Difficulty of Right-Wing Organisation

While not a steadfast rule throughout history, it is no secret that the Right often performs poorly when organising. Since the mid-20th century, it has failed to advance its interests, relegating itself to a position of mild opposition against leftist cultural agendas. Instead of forming a useful bloc, the Right now represents the rightmost edge of the Overton Window, cementing the victories of yesterday’s leftists.

Some argue that the Right’s woes stem from its lack of a comprehensive program outlining a vision for the ‘good life’, as it tends to define itself in opposition to the Left. While this argument holds some truth, it is not entirely accurate. Within the mainstream Right—as best exemplified by Britain’s Tory Party and associated with GB News and Talk TV—the ‘Right’ often acts as little more than Progressivism-following-the-speed-limit. It is a faction enacting and defending the policies of the Left with a more ‘highbrow’ veneer—well, most of the time.

The groups in question are not truly Rightist in character or philosophy. I identify this contingent as the Fake Right, an entity occupying a space within the media and political establishment that traps and diffuses energy away from the Real Right. The Real Right consists of anyone deemed ‘too Right’ or ‘Woke’—more on that later. The Fake Right’s primary concern is to control the acceptable parameters of conversation and impose strict legal consequences on any group trying to organise around classical Right-wing principles such as hierarchy, social bonds, community, European culture, traditional sexual roles, and masculine vitality. This function contains any true Right-wing energy and prevents effective organisation from being achieved. The following analysis will delve into these themes as they pertain to UK politics.

The Fake Right

Paul Gottfried, in his essay Defining Right and Left, states that “the establishment non-Left has absorbed leftist values and attitudes that have come from a predominantly leftist culture and educational system.” Gottfried is correct—the mainstream currents of Western right-wing thought are characterised by “​​an overshadowing vision of universal equality” and a self-imposed mission to “move mountains in order to confer ‘human rights’ on the entire world.” This false strain of ideology must be disentangled from what can be considered as a ‘true’ right-wing in order for us to comprehend the true difficulty of right-wing organisation in the West.

Today, many figures within the paltry British Right are former leftists who were abandoned at the wayside by their revolutions. They had reached a position where the new societal norms were to their liking but were alienated by the comrades they had been fighting alongside moments before as they continued to push the boundaries. Once they realised this, they split from the movement and were welcomed into the Right with open arms. Auron MacIntyre deems this ‘The Ratchet Effect’; again, Gottfried expresses it eloquently:

One does not join the essentialist Right by wishing to get off the train of progress just before the present moment. As a practical position, one might find the civil rights legislation of the 1960s to be less intrusive than its later additions, or an earlier phase of the feminist movement to be less intrusive than what has been called by its critics “gender feminism.” I would be the last to question someone’s right to choose a less drastic rather than a more extreme form of government social engineering, given what came later. But one does not prove one’s rightist credentials by making such choices—save by the standards of a Left that is perpetually trying to move political debate further into its energy field.

The TERFs exemplify this tendency, as well as the establishment Right's tripping over itself to welcome such people into its circles. It is one thing to be courteous to someone who has experienced 'cancellation'; it is another to allow them to shape your movement. J. K. Rowling is the same progressive leftist she always was—her criticisms of trans ideology have made it clear that she is in full support of anyone who ‘needs’ trans surgery. Her opposition originates from her horror at the idea that many young girls suffering from similar problems to her teenage self–insecurity and mental illness–could choose to destroy their bodies because gender ideology presents this as a solution to their problems. This is a position I sympathise with, but it does not make her my political ally: her quarrel is simply where the revolution left her and other TERFs. Rowling still supports every other edict of the Current Thing and can always be relied on to attack those to her right as homophobic, xenophobic, racist, and misogynist.

Another example, and one which causes some division within our audience, is James Lindsay. He has become a stalwart of the centre-right and his books are a go-to for anyone looking for a classically liberal refutation of leftist dogma or communist rhetoric. But Lindsay is not attacking these dogmas from a Right-wing position, nor a truly classically liberal one. He is arguing on behalf of a dead and buried 90s' liberalism, one that is not coming back and can never come back due to the changes in circumstances we have experienced since then. At most Lindsay could be described as a milquetoast Republican or someone whose social views differ very little from a 90s Clinton Democrat.

But perhaps characterising Lindsay as a milquetoast Republican is giving him too much credit. I'm not sure that the Republican voter base would agree with this passage from the introductory chapter of his and Helen Pluckrose's 2020 book Cynical Theories:

This is not a book that seeks to undermine liberal feminism, activism against racism, or campaigns for LGBT equality. On the contrary, Cynical Theories is born of our commitment to gender, racial and LGBT equality and our concern that the validity and importance of these are currently being alarmingly undermined by Social Justice approaches. Nor will this book attack scholarship or the university in general. Quite the contrary, we seek to defend rigorous, evidence-based scholarship and the essential function of the university as a centre of knowledge production against anti-empirical, anti-rational, and illiberal currents on the left that threaten to give power to anti-intellectual, anti-equality, and illiberal currents on the right.

Is this not plain Leftist sentiment being expressed here? Within the framework laid out above there is no rational argument to be made against any and all forms of Leftist social engineering. If your goal is equality of the sexes, equality between all races, and equality of all who declare unusual sexual proclivities and identities, then the only quarrel to be had with the Left is how to achieve those ends, rather than any meaningful distinction in what ends society should be orientated towards. The Leftist programme is simply what they see as the most efficient way to reach their egalitarian ends, and all Lindsay and Pluckrose can do is quibble over the finer details of what law and how much social engineering is going too far and may provoke a backlash. 

Some have excused this by suggesting that Helen Pluckrose, Lindsay's coauthor, may be the architect of this passage. Even if this is the case—we'll never know, unless the authors tell us who wrote each sentence of the entire book—Lindsay still felt comfortable enough to put his name to it. Either way, this passage validates accusations that the goals of those who call themselves the centre-right are the same as those of the left. Their only substantive disagreement is the contention that more extreme strains of thought within progressive academia empower and embolden the Right.

Perhaps this would not be so much of a problem if Lindsay et al. were willing to address their critics on the Right with any level of good faith. When I and others have criticised him for his refusal to acknowledge or sincerely explore Rightist ideas, he has reverted to childish insults and playground barbs. He now occasionally aims his attention at the "Woke Right," which is an entirely nonsensical term. Slandering Right-wing ideas as "anti-intellectual," he now shies away from discussion with any leading contemporary Rightist thought-leaders. On Twitter, for example, he is very quick to block or insult anyone he deems unacceptably illiberal. 

Paul Gottfried is a man no one could seriously describe as anti-intellectual. I have quoted his work above, and his books After Liberalism and Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt are indispensable reading, along with his two-part study on Fascism and antifascism. He has distinguished himself as a deep thinker and on a personal note seems to be a pleasant man in conversation. Despite this, Lindsay insulted him publicly for his article Marx Was Not Woke; a piece for Chronicles magazine that did not substantially differ in its genealogical analysis of the origins of woke; Marx to Gramsci, Gramsci to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to the universities etc., but did suggest that the liberals of the 50s and 60s also played a more significant role in transforming US culture than Lindsay would like to admit. Because of this, it seems the conflict was motivated by a hit on his intellectual pride, where Lindsay did not want to give legitimacy to Gottfried’s blaspheme against liberalism by speaking to him respectfully, despite Gottfried and others suggesting that an honest conversation between the two could be productive.

Apart from this scenario serving as a display of hypocrisy and moral cowardice by Lindsay, it serves another function by marginalising Right-wing views in the greater dialectic. He is setting the boundaries for his vast audience of what is acceptable and what must be avoided if you want to remain a good liberal, even going so far as to use leftist tactics like labelling the ideas of Carl Schmitt as 'justifications for Nazi war crimes', without ever clarifying what those ideas are or explaining them coherently. If those ideas are smeared as beyond the pale due to association with Nazism or mockery, then anybody looking to explore them has to traverse an emotional barrier before he can allow himself to give them a fair shot. I do not know if Lindsay understands that this is what he is doing consciously, but the effect is the same.

What Is “Woke”?

What tends to unite all people under the banner of "the Right" is a shared opposition to "Woke" culture. But beyond this, there is very little that these various factions and figures share in common. Additionally, and worryingly, "woke" is a word that has a scattering of nebulous meanings around it that not everyone agrees on, and as such seems like unstable ground to organise an effective long-term political coalition around.

Many have tried to define "woke," and I have never been satisfied with the definitions these people have given. The problem has been that they accept the Progressives' framing of themselves as honest actors and over-intellectualize the matter as a result. If you accept "woke" on its own grounds, it is nothing more than a collection of intellectual concepts that bind together to provide a confused and contradictory worldview. Within this understanding, "woke" is a well-meaning but ultimately flawed worldview that leads to radical prescriptions on what should be done to reform the world in the pursuit of egalitarian ends. “If we can only get through to these people with reasonable arguments,” the Sensible Man thinks to himself, “we can come to an acceptable compromise for all.” I reject this entirely. The vitriol and violence that is regularly met by those outside of the woke or Progressive worldview surely demonstrates that Leftist politics are not motivated by compassion and empathy but by malice and resentment.

My definition is that "woke" is a coalition group of political outsiders and rejects, formed and manoeuvred by the establishment to disenfranchise the majority native populations of Europe, and the European-descended population of the US, with particular venom directed at White men. You are probably more familiar with the term ‘intersectional coalition’. When analysing intersectionalism, most get the genealogy backwards and assume that the intellectual foundations of this alliance came first and then the group formed around these intellectual arguments. This is wrong. "Woke" is based entirely around the grievances of outgroups, such as immigrants, minorities, and sexual deviants, and weaponizes their grievances to form a hostile political faction that can be mobilised in exchange for the promise of material benefits from the state. These material benefits may or may not materialise in reality, but what gets people into action is the promise of future rewards.

All of the intellectual work done around and on behalf of these groups is, like most intellectual work, simply a post-hoc explanation intended to justify criminal behaviour and political action. By the time Critical Race Theory was developed in the '70s through to the '90s, the US had already been through the '60s race riots, which would put the George Floyd BLM riots of 2020 to shame. Queer Theory was built upon the successes of gay protests that had already been going on for 20 years. Offshoots such as fat theory are naked excuses for gluttony, laziness, and excess. All of these theories are nothing more than intellectual propaganda. This propaganda is dispersed to the populace through schools, news, and films. This sheds light on the oft-remarked point that the movement is made up of contradictory and oppositional factions that lead to ridiculous developments like gay rights campaigners being lumped in alongside Muslims. While they are opposed independently, they can be temporarily marshalled together against a greater common foe; oppressive Western society. It also explains why White women are a peripheral member of the coalition. Feminism presents Western society as an oppressive patriarchy that has ‘kept women down’ for generations, giving them a common enemy with the greater movement, but are later attacked and scapegoated by their erstwhile allies for embodying “White feminism,” which is a code term for “white supremacy,” which is itself just an aggressive term for Western culture, and forced to apologise for this crime by becoming subservient to other factions. This subservience is later weaponised through the social pressures women personally apply on men in day-to-day life, as well as in businesses through HR departments, where women are vastly overrepresented in management positions.

Because the propaganda that surrounds these groups and their narratives is all-pervasive, it wins converts even from within the group that it is attacking: White men. The propaganda does not need to be persuasive or even logically consistent with itself to work because it is pushed through every avenue of culture, as well as through the government and the academies, which apply unbearable social pressure on normal people to conform. When faced with the impression that all of his peers and society as a whole share the woke worldview, even if it doesn’t make a lick of sense, the average man will bow to pressure and fall in line, if only to avoid henpecking, conflict and isolation from his peers. Even among those friends he can trust with his real feelings, they will gather away from prying eyes and speak in hushed tones. Therefore, a situation can arise where true believers are vastly outnumbered by those disingenuously repeating slogans to get through their day peacefully, and none of them are any the wiser that everyone around them is a similar fraud, because an unorganised majority cannot effectively band together around their interests without a disciplined minority leading them.

Hence, I find Lindsay’s use of the term “woke right” insidious. If ‘woke’ is not a set of intellectual concepts that bind together to form a confused societal framework, but instead throw away excuses for grievance politics among outsider groups, then nothing on the Right can, by definition, be woke. If instead, Lindsay is using the term "woke" to mean anyone who would be willing to use state power to enforce societal standards, then he will have to call the vast expanse of human action within history woke. He would even have to classify himself as woke, as he has repeatedly made it clear that he would not support the repealing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which explicitly codifies behavioural standards for how businesses and government agencies have to conduct themselves regarding race and other protected characteristics. If you disobey these standards, then you are liable to legal action from the state as well as private actors. This is, definitionally, the state using the law to enforce social behaviour, and if Lindsay is in support of it, I suppose that makes him woke by his own standards. Or perhaps this is just the kind of silly reasoning to be expected when throwing around recently coined terms and sticking them to groups and circumstances they don’t apply to.

What must be concluded instead is that Lindsay and others like him throw "woke" at their ideological opponents to the Right as well as the Left simply to stigmatise them. Because of how common the word has become, "woke" has acquired a stink to it, and some political actors hope that people will dismiss figures on the Right as easily as they do figures of the Left if they invoke "woke." I consider this to be antagonistic and foolish behaviour, as the ‘solutions’ presented by “anti-woke” groups are woefully ill-equipped to deal with the real problems Western civilization faces; the most pressing of which being mass immigration enabled by our elites and the resultant hostile minority populations gradually building within European nations. I sympathise with their opposition to gender ideology, but on other issues, anti-wokes have very little to offer save for our future opposition and present a woefully fractured coalition for any future political action.

The Tory Party

The Tory Party is not only the most successful political party in the UK but possibly the most successful political party of any democratic country in the world. This is frustrating because the Tories are understood by the majority of people to exemplify the 'Right-wing' of UK politics. This public perception has been fostered by media manipulation; there are countless shows–satirical panel shows, comedy specials, serious drama series, and news outlets—that treat everything the Tories do as if it were the action of Hitler back from the grave. What the Tories do, despite their reputation, is promote policies that would have been unthinkable even under the New Labour government of Tony Blair. While Blair may have opened up the UK borders, the Tories accelerated the levels of net immigration per year to 606,000 at the end of June 2022. While Labour may have introduced the Equalities Act of 2010, the Tories have not only not repealed it but, under their watch, we have seen the streets of Whitehall blanketed with Progressive Pride flags. It is clear that not only are the Tories a leftist party, but they are the most radically Left-wing party the UK has ever had in power. But how does this fit in with their perception as a vile, fascist dictatorship?

Again, this perception is driven entirely by the media and separated from reality. The Tories perform a number of important 'roles' in the theatre of UK politics, which is supported by this fallacious media coverage. The first is playing the evil heel; doing and saying things the media portrays as hostile to the public interest; making Right-wing policies look bad, and as a byproduct, Left-wing policies look good. The secondary, and more damaging consequence of this is that when they announce that they will reduce immigration to less than 100,000 net per year, and then months later backtrack on this and 'admit' that record-breaking levels of immigration are necessary to maintain a functional economy, not only are they playing the cowardly, incompetent heel, they make populist policies seem impossible to implement practically. Again, if public perception of the Tories is that they represent Right-wing politics, they make us all look bad by association.

Their most important role is to render any energy on the Right completely ineffectual. Time after time, the Tories have campaigned on populist policies like Brexit that were spearheaded by parties to their right and later gone on to malform them into their exact opposite. Leave did not win the Brexit referendum because the public wished for more third-world immigration; it won because it wanted an end to almost all immigration and a reassertion of British cultural values. But under a Boris Johnson-led, Brexit-backing Tory party, what Britain got was a dramatic increase in third-world immigration.

Because voters in the UK have a hard time voting for any parties outside of the ‘Big Two’—Tories and Labour—if the Tories capture the energy of Right-wing movements by campaigning on popular populist policies, it draws votes away from the parties that might make good on their promises. Additionally, the Tories have the advantage of being the oldest party in Britain and therefore being grandfathered in as a party the public trust to be staffed by competent veterans who know the system inside and out. The public trusts these veterans with the keys to government more than any third party, who are not expected to know how to effectively navigate Westminster and Whitehall. Amusingly, this creates the paradoxical view that the Tories are at the same time incompetent buffoons and the only party able to put the UK back on track. However, this perception might be slipping at the time of writing.

Furthermore, the Tories and Labour form a ‘uni party.’ The members of these parties socialise with each other, take advice from the same people, and believe in the same goals for government. The uni party is replicated in the US where political elites have shown repeatedly that they prefer international security for foreign nations over the well-being of their own country. The two arms of the uni party only differ on the means of reaching their ends, and even then only barely. Operating this way, whenever a third party threatens their hegemony, they close ranks to ensure that outsiders do not get a place at the table. Essentially, the uni party shares power between themselves and switches over every so often to present the illusion that power is changing between meaningfully different parties.

If you, as an outsider, decide to 'infiltrate' the Tory party so you can break up the uni party or create any lasting change, you will be jammed up by party mechanisms and bureaucracy and rendered ineffective. As was shown by David Cameron's diversification of the party when he changed the selection process for MPs, if you are not a demographic fit, you will not be allowed into a position of influence. Even if you fit their preferred demographics, the inner party will not allow you to make any upward progress unless you toe the party line and, preferably, have some skeletons in your closet that can be used for future blackmail. Consider Piggate, Matt Hancock's affair, and Partygate. If I am proven wrong in the future and the Tory party is subverted to work in the interests of the British people, I will hold my hands up, but until then, I hold out no hope for this party.

The only conclusion to be had from this analysis is that the Tory party must collapse entirely before any effective political action can take place within the UK. I do not believe it can be reformed; something must rise up to take its place. But considering that they are the cockroach of UK politics, their demise seems depressingly far away.

With all that said, what does this leave for the real Right, and why can they not organise?

The Real Right

There is a problem with identifying the core values that define the Right. As with any political movement, there are contingencies based on time and place that result in variations between Rightist movements. But there is a fundamental strain of Rightist thought, philosophy, and behaviour that defines and underpins all of the splintered movements. There is no clearer definition of Right-wing than Paul Gottfried’s, as found by revisiting his essay Defining Left and Right:

The Right affirms inherited hierarchy, favours the particularistic while being suspicious of what claims to be the universal, aims at preserving social traditions where possible, and opposes the Left by every means at its disposal. The Left takes the opposite positions on the first three points out of a sense of fairness, a passionate commitment to the advancement of equality, and a conception of human beings that stresses sameness or interchangeability.

While the Right believes that not all people are the same and wish to keep it that way, the Left thinks all people could be the same and therefore should be, and is willing to kill to achieve that goal. The Left believes in the Universal Man: out of time, out of place, able to be dropped into any circumstance and operate as he would anywhere else, bereft of the weight of history. These differences in worldview produce the violent tensions between both sides of the political spectrum, as these two standpoints are incompatible with one another. At its simplest, the Right are anti-egalitarians.

This also presents another reason why the false Right can never claim to truly be on the Right; they too believe that everyone could and should be the same: individuals living in liberal democracies, interchangeable tools to be dropped into society where the market needs them, with the freedom to indulge in atomistic and consequence-free consumer choices. Some of the neocon variety believe that unequal, illiberal countries on the far side of the world must be bombed into this line of thinking. This is simply another environment for Universal Man to operate within. Communistic Leftists believe that Universal Man will be most efficient within a socialist economy, and free market Leftists believe the greatest gains for the bean counters will be within the market economy. For all they disagree on, their conception of Universal Man and his ultimate goals—eat, grow fat, be merry—are the same.

Oppositionally, the true Right rejects the notion of an atomized individual, bereft of context, and recognizes that people are shaped by “forces we most definitely have not chosen for ourselves, but which nonetheless shape our beings and belief systems. We bring with us a context, even if it gratifies our vanity to think that we fashion our personalities and give ourselves 'values' by dint of personal will. The range of our life choices is far more determined by culture, heredity, and geographic location.” In his Considerations on France, De Maistre sums this up eloquently: “There is no such thing as man in the world. In my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I know even that one can be Persian, but as for man; I declare that I have never met him in my life; if he exists, he is unbeknownst to me.”

Similarly, Right-Left can overlap with Thomas Sowell’s Constrained and Unconstrained visions, developed in his classic study A Conflict of Visions. The Constrained Vision, from which Sowell drew heavily from Adam Smith, recognizes the “moral limitations of man in general, and his egocentricity in particular,” as “inherent facts of life, the basic constraint in his vision.” Within this vision of human nature, the “fundamental moral and social challenge was to make the best of the possibilities which existed within that constraint, rather than dissipate energies in an attempt to change human nature.”

This is opposed to the Unconstrained Vision, which Sowell based on William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. In this vision; “man's understanding and disposition were capable of intentionally creating social benefits. Godwin regarded the intention to benefit others as being 'of the essence of virtue,' and virtue in turn as being the road to human happiness.” When Unconstrained, Universal Man is “capable of directly feeling other people's needs as more important than his own, and therefore of consistently acting impartially, even when his interests or those of his family were involved.” If this sounds horrifying to those of you who care about your family and others close to you, or at best unworkable, worry not, as Godwin is only referring to "men as they hereafter may be made." This idea, that humanity can be morphed and twisted into whatever form fits the preference of Universal Man, is a constant of the Left and has motivated some of the most brutal revolutions the world has ever known.

If the words of theorists do not convince you, the Left-Right dichotomy has even been captured through scientific study. In Waytz, Iyer, Young, et al., researchers examined seven studies looking into parochial vs. universal compassion between different political temperaments. The findings were remarkable in how well they lined up with the statements and observations of Gottfried, Sowell, Smith, and many others: “Liberals, relative to conservatives, express greater moral concern toward friends relative to family, and the world relative to the nation.” The image of the Particular vs. Universal Man is born out in these findings, and even more curiously, “these universalist versus parochial tendencies extend to humans versus nonhumans more generally.” So what we find is not only do self-described liberals care more for those outside of their close community ties, but they often care more for non-human animals than they do human beings. This is blatant anti-humanism displayed by some more radical members of the Left.

On how the Rightist vision manifests as government, the preferred form for a Rightist state varies, but there is a shared understanding that mass democracy is unsustainable and entropic. When every political faction competes with one another, politics becomes less about providing stability for a nation or people than providing stability for the ruling class, which takes the form of handing out material favours to citizens in exchange for votes. This form of politics makes degeneration inevitable.

Why The Right Cannot Organise

Before anything remotely approaching what I would consider an ideal state can be realised, the elites occupying the current state must be removed and replaced by people more friendly to a healthy and flourishing Britain. Our current elites have shown a callous disregard for the well-being of the country and its people, as well as old-fashioned corruption. This will also entail replacing the bureaucracy that makes up Whitehall, as well as shutting down hostile government bodies like those for Equality and Diversity that do nothing but victimise British people and waste their tax money.

However, any political action or party that explicitly runs on these policies will be prevented from running, no matter how wildly popular they are. This is the same sentiment that helped Trump win the presidency in 2016; this is what “drain the swamp” was all about. But if you want to understand why the Right cannot organise in the UK, it is for the same reasons Trump has been impeached twice and is currently awaiting trial for election obstruction. Trump did not succeed in draining the swamp despite his vast reserves of money, as well as massive popular support, so if he cannot succeed in his aims, how can a coalition of online anons and financially strapped political hopefuls succeed in doing the same here, when the UK has stricter speech laws and legislation deeming certain types of organisation unlawful? If the British Right wants to stand for their native, particular peoples in support of their identity, culture, and heritage, against the Universal Man, then organising around these principles is illegal due to the Equality Act of 2010.

The Equality Act was passed in the last gasps of Gordon Brown’s New Labour and was a consolidation of multiple pieces of legislation, including the previous 2006 Equality Act, the Equal Pay Act 1970, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, and the Race Relations Act 1976, among others. It establishes 'protected characteristics' that are guarded under the law, including race, sexual orientation, disability, etc. Government bodies and private businesses have a required duty under this act to not discriminate against people who display these protected characteristics. Under Section 11 of the Act, employers are allowed to take 'positive action' to 'remove barriers to diversity,' which in practice means discriminating against those not protected, most commonly straight white men. Amusingly, the government guidance classifies this as 'action' rather than 'discrimination' with meaningless distinctions like setting 'targets' for your business to recruit diverse staff, rather than 'quotas.' What the difference between these two is beyond arguing semantics, I do not know.

The Equality Act also gives authority to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, which has free rein to investigate your party or organisation at any time and audit it for diversity. This was established under the 2006 act but continued under the 2010 revision. If you are not toeing the line of where 'acceptable' UK politics is and if you are deemed unacceptably homogenous or non-inclusive they will punish you with financial and legal penalties. The only way to avoid these penalties will be to allow people from diverse backgrounds, whether racial or sexual, into your organisation. While this does not immediately signal the end for any Right-wing organisation, it does open you up to infiltration by bad-faith actors if you are not able to properly vet these characters and need them to fill an arbitrary diversity quota. Furthermore, it allows anyone of diverse backgrounds to launch a legal case if they decide that your hiring process or requirements could be deemed 'discriminatory.'

To illustrate how ridiculous this legislation is, the government guidance on how businesses can comply gives the example of a hair salon whose owner does not employ stylists who cover their hair. Her justification is that she thinks the stylists displaying their excellent hair will bring in better business. This all sounds perfectly reasonable. But the guidance clarifies, “It is clear that this policy puts Muslim and Sikh women at a particular disadvantage as well as Sikh men who cover their hair. This may be indirect discrimination unless the policy can be objectively justified.” So unless you can “objectively justify” your policies, which will be entirely down to the judgement of a government bureaucrat, you can face legal action for simply running your business how you want. Even worse, under Section 30(3) of the Equality Act 2006, which is maintained through the 2010 consolidation, the EHRC can bring a firm to judicial review without requiring a victim to have brought a case to them. So all it takes is the political Eye of Sauron falling on you to incur a visit from the Leftist Inquisition.

Here lies the problem; any Right-wing opposition that reveals itself in Britain, that is not immediately contained by the establishment and Tory party, would be vetted by the EHRC and found wanting, at which point financial and political penalties would be levied. We can see this happening right as we speak in Germany, where considerations are being taken on whether the right-of-centre AfD should be banned outright from standing in elections. In Britain itself, Nigel Farage’s bank account with Coutts was recently closed without warning due to his political views. His legal action is ongoing, so it remains to be seen what the conclusion of this debacle will be. The AfD and Farage, while right-of-centre, are hardly the most ardent Right-wingers in the world, so if this is what the establishment does to mild threats from rivals, we can only imagine what would be done to those posing a threat from a more traditional Right. This cannot go on forever, but as those in power get more desperate and tear away the facade of democratic politics to maintain their positions, there is no telling what they could do, and many do not want to paint crosshairs on their back, especially if they have families.

What Can Be Done?

In the face of overwhelming odds, what can you do after reading this article? You might think that I am being pessimistic in laying out the challenges that confront any true right-wing movement from forming, but sadly, I am just being realistic. I do not want to be all doom and gloom. Either way, this does not free us from our obligation to act; it simply informs how we should act to ensure we are not wasting our time or needlessly endangering ourselves.

At present, when political forces are centralising their power more than ever and becoming more transparent in how they punish their enemies, the best option for any dissident is to maintain a close group of friends and family around you whom you can trust and participate in informal civic groups that either do not draw attention to themselves or are not large enough to fall under the power of the EHRC. If you can participate safely within political spheres, then do so, but not at the threat of endangering your family. Risks are yours, not burdens to put on others. If it is as simple as posting anonymously online through a platform like Twitter, injecting new life and knowledge into the discourse, then you are doing something. In the future, if concrete political action can be taken once the regime has weakened, then the connections and relationships you have built will be of good use.

Hope is not lost. The system and ruling elite we live under will not last forever, and their current consolidation shows that they know this; they only band together because they are weak. Whether or not it happens in our lifetimes, there will come a time when we are governed by people who do not hate us, and we can ascend again to heights we once reached, and perhaps even surpass them.